Leah dropped a tweet into Slack with an “ummmm” affixed beforehand:
Hogwarts didn't always have bathrooms. Before adopting Muggle plumbing methods in the eighteenth century, witches and wizards simply relieved themselves wherever they stood, and vanished the evidence. #NationalTriviaDay
— Wizarding World (@wizardingworld) January 4, 2019
I did some telltale nerdly throat-clearing and gamely told her that this information was not new; it had been published on Pottermore in a larger piece about the history of the Chamber of Secrets several months ago, and I kept avoiding it because of how angry it made me. Because it makes no sense, and also, it ruins one of my favorite headcanons about the Potter series.
See, the thing I always assumed was that the castle magically rearranged around the Chamber as it was reconstructed over the years. Which would be hilarious because nothing is better than the idea of Salazar Slytherin being such a garbage self-important ass, and putting this special spot in the castle all for himself and his descendants… only to have a perfect random act of magical architecture later place the entrance to his Super Secret Clubhouse in a bathroom. But no, we find out that one of his heirs basically had to redo the door when the castle was renovated to include bathrooms, which totally ruins that little piece of cosmic justice.
And then there’s the ridiculous aside about Muggle plumbing methods being adopted by wizards because before the advent of plumbing, they were just going wherever and vanishing the evidence. Which is silly because why would you go from “vanishing” to a sudden need for wizarding waste-treatment plants? Who gets that job? (House-elves, let’s be realistic. So that’s a fun job for them.)
It also calls the term “vanishing” into question. Because it could actually mean several things.
- You literally make it disappear. So it’s still there, but not visible. Maybe every time you think you’ve stepped in dog crap, it’s just a “present” left by a magical neighbor who forgot their manners? [Leah: GAHHH.]
- You vanish it to a different location. Question is, where? Do you have a specific area in mind, or does it just end up anywhere? Because that’s freaking chaos. Unless it’s like Apparating, and you have to have the new location in mind. Which is even more ridiculous because then you’re just visualizing empty fields or rock quarries to send your waste to? Maybe? Do you have a favorite forest or farm where you shuffle it all away? [Leah: No. No No No NO.]
- Space. You vanish it to space. Who knows what sort of trouble that will be down the line.
- You literally magic it into nothing. It ceases to exist. [Leah: This is causing me real, physical pain.]
The fourth option is clearly the neatest and most sensible of the lot. Except it begs about eighteen-thousand more questions about how magic works once you make that decision. Because once you can literally wink something out of existence with magic, you could potentially wink anything else out of existence. A hairbrush. All leftover food on dinner plates. A skyscraper.
Leah: OR A HUMAN BEING WHICH IS ORGANIC MATTER JUST LIKE ITS WASTE PRODUCTS OMG.
And additionally, option four makes the idea of indoor plumbing seem absurd. Why would you move to a complicated Muggle waste system when you could just make it go away? No one would be into this idea. Which makes the other three options more likely, but they’re still terrible and senseless options. They are all bad. This was a bad idea, it could have been so easily avoided by just not telling us about this.
Leah: DAMMIT.
This also means that parents are stuck doing cleanup for their kids until they can gets wands, probably. (Until they are ELEVEN YEARS OLD???) At least in the western wizarding world, since not everyone uses wands. Also, not everywhere has indoor plumbing, so what’s the deal for places that are still without it? Wizards and witches deal the old-fashioned way?
And this is all without getting into the fact that Hogwarts plumbing seems to dump straight into their lake. With the merfolk and the giant squid in it.
Leah: But maybe the giant squid is actually a high-tech water filter Charmed to look like a squid? That way it keeps the water clean…ish and stops the kids from swimming in the, uh, the poo-water. Plus the merfolk maybe won’t die of wizard dysentery? OK. Cool, this is my head canon now, thanks for this.
McGonagal answered this to get into Ravenclaw tower in Hallows. Vanished objects go everywhere, into non-being.
Since JKR has an excellent Classical education, I doubt this factoid is from her. There was indoor plumbing during the Roman Republic, long before England was infested with the Romans who left behind massive public baths and sewage systems. Archeologists have also found various types of latrines and middens in prehistoric sites. So, the magical community would have had to be remarkably stupid not to pick up the idea of indoor plumbing before Hogwarts was built.
Poor squibs born into families with houses with no bathrooms.
This illuminates the push-and-pull of different styles of Fantasy. Stories which don’t have ironclad rules which are followed just handwaves away such questions as unimportant. The Lord of the Rings and modern literature Fantasy are of the handwavey “oh nevermind, a wizard did it” variety. The type of Fantasy where such considerations are important has become known as Hard Fantasy.
The very reason Hard Fantasy came about is because we all know the real world operates by following rules, thus rendering the “wizard did it” answer unsatisfactory to many people.
Harry Potter has always been unsatisfying to me because it has this contradiction at its heart. On the one hand Rowling sets hard-and-fast rules, but sometimes it’s just wizardry. Whoever came up with this notion of vanishing one’s poo, whether Rowling or someone else, has actually underscored this inherent discontinuity of the Potter universe. Answering one question leads to a host of others, and pulling on that string unravels the entire tPestry
“Vanish” is hugely problematic for so many reasons.
I like the David Eddings solution (Belgarion/Malloreon) solution which is the universe exists to bring things into being, and while you can burn, break or otherwise destroy an object with sorcery, you can’t make it un-exist.
Here, if “vanish” is a thing (to make not exist, as distinct from destroying or disintegrating where the object still exists but in a changed form) it creates huge practical and story problems.
That seems wrong to me as well. Even if they were just vanishing away the waste, they’d still probably have private places to do it indoors (and chamber pot equivalents to go into before vanishing it). I have a hard time thinking they’d literally just . . . . go and then vanish it (although that does raise the unintentionally hilarious possibility of wizards and witches urinating/defecating in their clothes and then vanishing the waste and the stains away).
So that is how the black lake got its name?
And we know that the Hogwarts could do precisely this because that’s how Dumbledore told Harry about the Room of Requirement.
@6, the unfortunate phrasing that wizards and witches “simply relieved themselves wherever they stood” seem to suggest that what you termed an “unintentionally hilarious possibility” is more than mere possibility.
/blink/
If the tweet didn’t originate with Rowling, it would be interesting to know where it did come from…because the thing is, the idea of a “waste spell” is NOT in fact unique to the Potterverse. It’s also a key component underlying a lot of the worldbuilding Sherwood Smith has done for the world of the Inda series (scroll down to the very bottom of the page here), in this case with just enough explanation to address the issues Emily raises). Note here that while the published versions of Inda and its numerous associated works postdate the publication of the Potter novels, the actual development of Sartorias-deles pre-dates the Rowling series by a considerable margin.
Just because the Romans already had latrines doesn’t mean it isn’t realistic that Medieval wizards didn’t. Rowling or whoever came up with this probably thought about Louis XIV’s court. Of course the switch to using toilets instead of vanishing doesn’t make sense.
http://thisisversaillesmadame.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-lack-of-toilets.html
https://www.planet-wissen.de/video-stille-oertchen–die-geschichte-der-toilette-100.html
The video is in German, but the history section near the beginning uses many images, so you can probably follow it without understanding the narrator.
Factoids like these are why I don’t go on Pottermore.
Fortunately, it’s not like there were any incidences in the books where the young wizards had problems mastering spells. Otherwise, we might have gotten scenes like:
The instructor wiped the drops of urine from his face and glared at the young wizard.
“So…. I see you’re still having problems mastering the Waste Spell, Mr. Weasley. You’ve just covered everyone in the room with urine and feces.”
Dumbledore grew up in a village in 19th century England. I don’t know if that means plumbing would have been a likely thing or not in his home, but the Room of Requirement gave him a wide choice of chamberpots one night, so I’m guessing that’s what he grew up with.
So, my theory:
Wizards and witches doing it wherever is one of those modern myths, one of those popular misrepresentations of the past (like westerns that show a west that was 99% male and nearly all going to die in a gunfight).
More likely, they had chamberpots. People who were good at the vanishing spell might use it for cleaning the chamberpots. But, this wouldn’t be everyone. We know some wizards and witches, like Tonks, were bad at housekeeping spells. Although Molly Weasley seems to have been good at housekeeping magic, the Weasleys used magic to wash dishes rather than vanish old food off plates. This suggests vanishing is a tricky spell and even people we would expect to be good at it don’t use it on a regular basis for cleaning.
Secondary theory:
Even with magic, I’m voting for the conservation of matter. “Vanishing” either breaks materials down to harmless components (probably spread out over a large area or vanishing spells of poop could result in a big burst of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen gas as hydrocarbons are broken down) or their shoved off into an other space, a slightly removed dimension, probably a space wizards draw on when spells seem to create things (and, we can only hope, a space where some things are decaying naturally or that is one huge compost heap with no compost that may break through someday). I favor dispersion, although that might require special rules for possibly unstable or dangerous elements.
Thank you for this article. I feel so angry about the idea but also gratified at evidence that Pottermore is as stupid as I always believed it to be. Nothing is worth absorbing except the original seven books, everything else that’s been done since is kinda garbage. I say this even though I just went to see Cursed Child and enjoyed the experience thoroughly … in terms of the canon it was rubbish.
Why did we ever need to know this?
I mean, magic or not, who actually wants to PEE ON THEMSELVES? I mean, it might make sense that, like so many other things, they lagged behind a bit due to their reliance on magic. I could see chamber pots or something similar with some kind of magic enhanced cleaning and not adopting technological advances as quickly. BUT JUST GOING WHEREVER THEY STOOD???? That’s just gross.
Or maybe they had some kind of magical chamber pots of holding?